Risky Business

“End of Watch” and “Arbitrage.”

“End of Watch” is a jumpy and exciting movie about the hazards of working as a cop in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood of sullen streets and treacherous alleys overrun by a Mexican drug-cartel gang that kills anyone who gets in its way. There’s a history of cop-buddy, cop-rivalry movies behind this film—including the sulfurous “Training Day,” with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke, which was written by David Ayer, who wrote and directed “End of Watch.” But none of the earlier projects were so completely dedicated to the companionability and the terror of police work. Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is intelligent, loquacious, and, at the beginning, single, teams up with Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), a married man who accepts the burdens and the pleasures of family life. In their patrol car—which serves as a home, theatre, and base of action—they talk endlessly about everything, exchanging satirical riffs: Brian does mock-Latino family talk, Mike does white-guy consumerist boasting. Gyllenhaal, his head shaved (Brian was a marine), is effusive and merry, a man whose fancy takes him everywhere. Peña is sombre and emotional. The movie is a Latino-Anglo solidarity pact: for all the cultural differences and bantering, the two men share a single-minded devotion to keeping order—or, at least, controlling disorder.

They burst into small stucco houses that the cartel controls—in one case, a house with silent illegal immigrants huddled in a caged area in the back. “Human trafficking,” someone mutters. In another, they find mutilated corpses in the back, a scene of recent torture. They also stop a guy in a truck with a “Liberace” (gold-tinted) AK-47 and serious money stashed in a can. These are all traces of the cartel operation, but Ayer doesn’t pull the strands of the story together, an ambiguity that I assume is intentional. The cops don’t always know what’s going on, or what one confrontation has to do with another. They’re not part of a “plot” but just slogging through the day-to-day mess of police work: you go into a building, and you don’t know what’s going to hit you. But some of their adventures are no more than ordinary, exhausting chores—such as saving little children from a burning house.

Ayer has a talent for depicting violent confrontations and filthy talk. Another, local gang definitely sets a standard for squalid thuggery. The women as well as the men hold conversations consisting almost entirely of variations on the F-word, with non-profane language appearing only rarely, and with a slightly embarrassed air, as if it didn’t know what it was doing there. The criminals take tremendous risks, propelling one another into crazier and crazier acts—it’s life on the edge, where dying is just another way of proving how tough you are. Ayer sets up the gang as the essence of self-destroying evil—nihilism as a working method and a game—and the two cops as fallible but potent reason personified. Catching things on the fly, Ayer uses a handheld camera, spinning down alleys, up stairways, in and out of apartments. The style of the action scenes is jangled, unsettling. When Ayer stages a fight, the camera seems right in the middle of it, tossed around by the blows. Some of the footage is meant to be a movie on police work that Brian is making as a project; the rest of it is shot from third-party perspectives. Ayer should have dropped the movie-within-a-movie, which is confusing in an unproductive way—we share the men’s point of view without it. We understand that they’re two guys who want to entertain themselves as much as possible as they plow through one murderously hard day after another.

It’s useless to pretend that the style of powerful men doesn’t have a special fascination. Robert Miller (Richard Gere), the swathed-in-Brioni hedge-fund manager at the center of “Arbitrage,” has a distinctive way of doing things, whether it’s talking to a lawyer, when he’s in trouble, without actually admitting anything; or curtly manipulating subordinates and family; or politely offering to buy people off when he has to. Nicholas Jarecki, who wrote and directed the movie, is counting on our curiosity about habits that few of us will ever have the chance to indulge. Less flamboyant than Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, in the “Wall Street” movies, or Jeremy Irons’s John Tuld, in “Margin Call,” Robert Miller is, in equal parts, bold, pragmatic, cynical, and far too intelligent to show off or make grand statements. Yet the movie dramatizes a week in which everything goes to hell. Sometime in the recent past, he made a sizable bet on Russian copper, and the money got trapped overseas. In New York, the stock market is down, investors are withdrawing assets from his fund, and he has borrowed four hundred million dollars, from a financial-world friend, to cover the hole in his balance sheet. At the same time, he’s trying to sell his company to a big bank whose C.E.O. (Graydon Carter) is stalling him in order to force down his price. Robert tries to steal away for a night with his mistress, Julie (Laetitia Casta), a swank French art dealer, but, driving with her upstate, his car spins out of control. Julie dies, and Robert, in misery, runs away from the accident. The movie lets us in on his calculations: his lover is dead, and he has to save his marriage and his employees, as well as himself. Will he get away with it? Robert is an S.O.B., but his point of view dominates the movie, and it’s in the nature of our relation to central figures in a narrative that we want to identify with them, even if we don’t much like them. It also helps if they look like Richard Gere rather than like, say, Lloyd Blankfein.

The best parts of “Arbitrage” avoid the usual moral simplicities. An N.Y.P.D. detective, Michael Bryer (Tim Roth), suspects that Robert is the man who fled the accident, and, as Roth plays him, Bryer is a ferrety pursuer—an envious Javert, enraged that the rich never get caught, who turns out to be less than straightforward himself. Part thriller, part character study, “Arbitrage” is Nicholas Jarecki’s first feature, and it moves swiftly and confidently, with many details that feel exactly right. (Jarecki, thirty-three, is the son of a successful financier—and the half-brother of the directors Andrew and Eugene Jarecki.) Robert strides into and out of rooms with the confidence of a man who knows that no door is closed to him. His town house is decorated in stunningly unostentatious good taste; the financial offices are either sleek and glass-panelled or mahogany dark. Jarecki doesn’t pump up the dialogue. He writes guarded, terse, bullying exchanges, and I enjoyed some of the shrewdly knowing touches, such as when Robert and his attorney, Syd (Stuart Margolin), a veteran fixer, decide that they need an African-American lawyer, so they secure the services of a counsellor they describe as “the best north of Ninety-sixth Street,” a phrase that combines respect and condescension in the same breath.

At the scene of the accident, Robert telephones Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), the twenty-three-year-old son of his deceased former driver. Jimmy picks him up and gets him home, but he has a record and is snared by Bryer. Despite the differences of power and money, there’s a long family connection, and some affection, between Robert and Jimmy. But the scenes between them, in which a wealthy white man tries to pay a younger poor man, who is black, to lie for him, don’t explode the way they should—Jimmy is too noble, and we lose interest in him. Nate Parker is a good actor, and Jarecki could have got more out of him. Susan Sarandon, as Robert’s wife, and Brit Marling, as his financial-whiz daughter, have some strong moments, but “Arbitrage” is pretty much Richard Gere’s show, and he does very well with it. Gere, now sixty-three, long ago lost the creamy narcissism that so enraged people in his youth. He still has a full head of white hair—an actor’s crown—but his too readily charming grin is just a memory. As Robert, Gere can draw on his past of playing winners, but when things don’t work out Gere looks drawn and desperate—you see the skull of a handsome man aging, and it’s a shock. His impatience and his anger are much closer to the surface; at times, he achieves the self-justifying rage that comes so easily to Al Pacino.

Arbitrage, in the financial world, is the simultaneous trading among two or more markets in which the same investments are valued differently. Only big risks produce big payoffs. Robert Miller practices moral arbitrage in his life, gambling on gains from lying to his family, the cops, and his business partners. The movie is a sardonic portrait of a rational man who keeps on calculating everything he does until he winds up in a void. ♦